A Theory of Possession and Property

The YouTube comments section is an unlikely place to have challenging and interesting conversations with people, but occasionally you find a few golden nuggets of philosophical thinking that challenge your understanding of the world. One such conversation occurred between myself and a person who argued that property was not a necessary aspect of the Non-Aggression Principle, and therefore we should be unable to use force to defend it. I think the person was playing devil’s advocate, but I was nonetheless unable to come up with an objective reason why the NAP required property at the time. I was unable to come up with a solid reason during the conversation, so I ultimately had to cut the conversation short in the interest of getting some sleep that night. I knew one thing for sure though. The more I thought about a world without property, the more absurd it sounded.

That conversation happened over a year ago, but I still sometimes think about it now. What I understood intuitively in that moment, I’ve come to understand on a more philosophical basis. To get an idea of where I’m coming from, let’s start with why I believe the NAP is a valid philosophical principle.

I’ve come to think that we need moral philosophy for one reason, and one reason only. Moral philosophy exists to determine a way in which people can live together in societies. Essential to society is the peaceful and prosperous coexistence of the entire in-group. Moral philosophy then must concern itself with peace and prosperity and give us a reasonably easy-to-understand-and-follow set of rules to achieve that end.

The NAP in my opinion is the only philosophical principle that I’ve encountered that is both internally and logically consistent which can coherently encompass all of human interaction, while also having an empirical basis by which it has been observed to achieve the ends of a moral philosophy: peaceful and prosperous societies. This is not to say that peace and prosperity require an understanding of and following of the NAP, it’s just that it’s the only way I’ve been presented with that makes any sense at all to me.

Now property is something that has been a bit of a sticking point for me on the NAP because as other thinkers I’ve read have defined it, it seems like you simply need to agree with your compatriots that property both exists and must be respected before a society can be built around it. I have a hard time with this because their definition of property seems to be wholly dependent upon a belief in the concept of property, rather than that it’s fundamentally true for some reason. I believe that property is something that supersedes society’s very existence, and that it doesn’t even require humans for it to exist. Here’s why.

You see, my definition of property is simply that someone must possess something, and that makes it their property. How do you possess something? Well, you go out into nature and you take it by expending some energy, then you use it in some way to continue living and prospering. Now this is something that plants and animals can do mind you. Not only can they do it, they must do it for survival.

A tree needs to absorb the energy from sunlight using photosynthesis in order to “eat.” It must occupy space in the soil and in the air above its root system. It must expend some of its acquired sunlight energy to absorb nutrients from the soil and produce sugars that can be metabolized for cellular respiration. It then must breathe both carbon dioxide and oxygen (yes, plants consume oxygen from the atmosphere as well, they just produce more of it than they use) in order for these metabolic processes to go forward. In this way, the tree has come to possess all of these resources, the air, the sunlight, the water, the nutrients, and made them into its property.

The only major difference between plants (or other photosynthetic organisms), and animals and other non-photosynthetic life is that they must get their energy by eating the produce of plants. They acquire the nutrients into their body and come to possess them in that way. They must occupy whatever space they happen to occupy at any given time, and they must be able to travel (if they are mobile) in order to acquire the necessary resources for survival.

The thing that allows animals to possess objects outside of their body is the fact that they are often territorial. This means that they sometimes tend to require the exclusive use of a territory in order for them to survive. This territory can be occupied by groups or by individuals, but it is again necessary for survival.

The human animal is no exception to this territorial nature. In order to survive, we need to form tribes that will exclusively occupy a territory that will support our needs. Since resources are scarce, this territorial dominance is necessary to the survival of the human animal, and therefore isn’t some philosophical construct, but a fact of nature that must be addressed by any society. This is regardless of whether it may be almost totally obscured by the prosperity of a society like ours, or if it is abundantly clear as it is in the third world.

The above is the reason why socialist societies always eventually fall apart. They fail to acknowledge not just a fact of human nature, but a law of the natural world itself. The fact that property and possession of it is required for life is a natural law in the way that “what goes up must come down” is in Newtonian physics. Life forms need resources and resources are scarce. A failure to acknowledge this and structure your society around it causes such societies to consume themselves and become hollowed out from the inside, eventually collapsing in ruin. Since any philosophy of how society should be structured must function within the natural world, a functioning society that uses the NAP (or any other principles) must extend the concept of self to that of the property that each individual possesses. I always just took this all for granted, but I was never able to articulate it until now.

Image is my original material taken with my Canon T2i